Golgotha Run

by Dave Stone

  She shoves into him, digging nails into his back to afford purchase, and gouges down.

  (An exquisite awareness of a slight mass under me. She’s slipping faster now and I’m shuddering and—)

  Eddie Kalish jerked awake.

  He wasn’t sure if something inside him had actively ejected him from the half-world of dreams—but he was damn glad that it had.

  The dream had been so vivid that it recalled those he’d had while his brain was being physically rewired under the Loup. Information being downloaded from some actual other world, or from some future that might be, or some past that might have been if he… no, the details fled from him even as he tried to pin them down.

  It was dark outside. He wondered if he had slept so long that he had missed one of his periodic inoculations with the Leash, thus explaining this sudden strength of his dreams. The Testostorossa’s time readout told him, though, that he had several hours to go.

  It wasn’t so much that the dream had been unpleasant, he thought. Not as such. It had been like patching into a glimpse from some other actual life, one he might have had—now or in the future—if someone, or something, or anyone and everybody wasn’t fucking him around in this one.

  The end result was one of just feeling a mindless rage for having something taken away from you, without ever knowing precisely what it was.

  The Loup, obligingly, dropped a piece of information into him. It was called an “involute”—a self-referring complex of ideas and images and emotions that lodges in the mind with such force that it seems more real than real, despite all evidence or logic. And in the hypnagogic state of waking up from sleep, Eddie was just having trouble working out what was real or not.

  Ah, well. That explained everything then.

  “Had a nice sleep, then?” the Testostorossa said, bringing Eddie instantly back to reality, or some reasonable approximation thereof. “Dreaming about scamming on some guys, I’ll bet.”

  Road signs swept past outside in an unreadable blur. Eddie didn’t have the slightest idea of where he was.

  The nature of running covertly meant that the Testostorossa was essentially now on autopilot, following a pre-programmed route. If they hit serious actual trouble then Eddie could override the controls and take them back to the Brain Train, but to all intents and purposes they were out of contact.

  It was the sense of disassociation that was getting to him, Eddie thought—and when you came to think about it, that was slightly weird in itself. For most of his life Eddie Kalish had lived quite happily without much contact with other people at all.

  Off to one side, through the Testostorossa window, the lights of some settlement or other hazed by, detached and drifting.

  The quiet, smooth motion of the car under its state-of-the-art suspension, was hypnotic. Without being quite aware that he was doing so, Eddie drifted off to sleep again…

  “So what are we thinking?” Masterton said over the comms-link. “Are we thinking that he bought it?”

  “Yeah,” said Trix Desoto, in the Brain Train Command and Control rig. “He bought it enough that he didn’t get we were using the idea of a communications blackout to isolate him. Give the Loup in him some more time to do some deep-level restructuring.”

  She glanced at the readouts from the front-runner Testostorossa, which, despite anything Eddie Kalish might think, was in constant contact with the Brain Train. The readouts were predominantly concerned with scans of Eddie’s neural activity, picked up by sensors hidden in the headrest of the driving seat.

  “He’s developing quite the little personality in there,” Trix said. “Should be something to see, you know—if it ever coheres and overtly evidences itself.”

  “If?” the voice of Masterton said. “You’re saying that even with this extra time, he won’t be in a fit state to, uh, eat?”

  “It’s just too little, too late,” said Trix. “If you want my opinion. I really don’t think he’ll be ready when we hit the Base. We could try it, I suppose, but God only knows what a partially functioning memoplex might do. Could be worse than nothing.”

  “How so?” asked Masterton.

  “Think of the differences between a skilled pilot at the stick of a Thunderstrike XIV, or nobody at all—or a brain-damaged moron flailing around every which way,” said Trix. “Even nobody at all would be better.”

  “I get your point,” said Masterton, “but nobody at all simply isn’t an option. Our… associates are getting really insistent that we get this operation up and running as soon as possible. I’d hate to think what would happen if they get tired of waiting and decide to act directly, you know?”

  “Would we?” Trix asked. “Would we even know?”

  “Damned if I want to find out,” said Masterton. “Use the boy if you can, if there’s any chance he’s ready—but you know what you have to do if he isn’t.”

  “Yeah,” said Trix Desoto, grimly. “I know what I have to do.”

  16.

  Eddie was awakened by a discreet chime from the dashboard HUD. At least, he would have been wakened by a discrete chime, had it not been drowned out by the Testostorossa shouting.

  “Wake up, fucker!” the Testostorossa was bellowing. “I got problems.”

  “What?” said Eddie. “What problems?”

  “Do you want the short explanation, or the technical one that’ll leave your brain running out of your ears?”

  The thought crossed Eddie’s mind that he could tell the Testostorossa to just go screw itself. There was nothing technical the Testostorossa could tell him that he wouldn’t understand, with the possible exception of the radio, courtesy of the Loup.

  Then again, he was just too tired. “Give me the short explanation.”

  “A number of my fusion-compensatory systems have drifted out of alignment,” the Testostorossa said. “We need to get off the road and stop so I can run a self-diagnostic recalibration.”

  “What?” Eddie said. “Now, hang on, GenTech must have spent millions on you—you’re telling me that, after all that, you have to stop for repairs after only a few hundred miles? What sort of shitty quality control do they have back there at the factory?”

  “Hey, they made you, fucker, yeah?” The Testostorossa’s belligerence seemed a little defensive. “I’m just saying that this is my first time out of the box, and there are some things you have to tweak when you’re on the actual road. To a certain extent I’m still prototypical; this is a shakedown-operation in more ways than one. I need to get off the road for a while, and for some reason doing it isn’t flagged as mission-critical—you have to tell me to do it.”

  Eddie thought about this. That was the first time he’d had the upper hand. The idea of cracking the electric whip, as it were, was a little bit tempting.

  “Supposing I say no?” he asked. “Purely for the sake of argument, you understand.”

  “Ever seen a hydro-fusion explosion from ground zero?” the Testostorossa said.

  “Do it!” Eddie snapped. “Do it now!”

  The Testostorossa segued off onto a slip road and ramped its power down, gliding to a halt.

  “Is this gonna take long?” Eddie said. “Cause I’m telling you I don’t like this. We’re out of contact with the Brain Train, stuck alone in the middle of nowhere and—oh fuck. There’s something up there.”

  Off to the side of the road, firelight and the bulky, silhouetted forms of vehicles.

  “Just my luck,” Eddie muttered to the Testostorossa. “You go wrong just in time to drop us in the middle of a gangcult camp.”

  Uncharacteristically, the Testostorossa remained silent. Presumably it was devoting its run-time to performing the self-diagnostics it had mentioned.

  Eddie fired up the microcams and cut in the image-enhancement. The monitor showed a collection of parked vehicles ranging from ancient pickup trucks to’ sixteen-wheeler RVs, daubed with cruciforms and what Eddie recognised as Burning Hearts and what, he presumed, were quotations from the Bible. />
  This latter presumption was confirmed by the HUD, which ran the configurations and attempted to pull an ID from its database. All it came up with was UNKNOWN and a potential threat-factor of, likewise, UNKNOWN.

  “Shit,” said Eddie.

  He was left with two choices. He could just sit there and pray that nobody noticed him, or leave the car and try to get a handle on what was going on.

  After maybe twenty minutes, however, Plan A began to pall. It was the sheer uncertainty that was the worst thing; sitting in the dark and waiting for God knew what to fall on him. At length, Eddie eased open a door and snuck towards the firelight, taking advantage of what ground-cover he could.

  Eddie made his cautious way around the bulk of a bulky sixteen-wheeler, wondering what gangcult-related horrors might meet his eyes. In the event, and horrific enough in its own way, he was utterly unprepared for a bunch of bearded, bespectacled freaks in jumpers, sitting around a campfire, strumming on guitars and singing “Kumbaya”.

  And, as the old joke goes, that was just the women.

  Actually, he saw, as his eyes accustomed themselves to the new lighting conditions with Loup-accelerated speed, that was just the group around the campfire that just happened to be near him. Around other fires, dotted around the patch of desert corralled by the various RVs, there were other figures.

  There was a confusing mix of attire and demeanour, but each of the people seemed to be what Eddie vaguely thought of as religious types. Prim church-ladies and Lutheran pastors rubbed shoulders and broke bread with ascetic and somewhat ragged figures in monk robes that looked more like what Rasputin would have worn—as opposed to those worthy Trappists who brew delicious beer to the glory of God, the aid and benefit of the Walloons, and walk in truth and beauty all their days.

  In fact, these robed figures seemed… not out of place exactly, but more definite and distinct than all the other religious types. In every group, they seemed to be the centre of attention. It was as if they had been imposed on the others, in the sense of stripping some new element into a photograph, and were guiding them.

  Shepherding was the word, Eddie supposed.

  “Greetings, brother,” said a voice behind him. “And how might we assist you this fine night?”

  Eddie nearly swallowed his tongue. There was just no way that someone could have come up from behind him like that, not with his well-known rat-line, and not to mention Loup-enhanced, senses alert for danger.

  He turned to see one of the thin robed figures. It was as if the man had simply materialised out of thin air.

  “I’ve, uh,” Eddie said, “I had a bit of car trouble. Nothing to worry about, it’s being… and then I saw your fires.”

  “A decided boon against the chills of the desert night,’” said the man. “Father Barnabas at your service. Might I invite you to warm yourself, a little, before going on your way?”

  “Uh…” Eddie didn’t have anything much against the religious types of the world; he didn’t bother them so long as they didn’t bother him. But there was something about this Father Barnabas that just creeped him out. He seemed entirely affable and harmless on the surface—but Eddie got the distinct impression that was what it was. The face was absolutely composed in a friendly smile, but there could be anything behind it.

  Of course, Eddie’s unease might have been due to the small fact that all those gathered here—every single one—had stopped their guitar-playing and breaking bread and whatever else the fuck it was they had been doing, and had silently turned towards him with similarly fixed and gnomic smiles.

  Eddie wondered about that, too, until the Loup supplied the information that the word “gnomic” had nothing whatsoever to do with gnomes.

  “Hey, listen,” he said. “I don’t want to… say, who are you guys, anyway?”

  “Josephites, for the most part,” said Father Barnabas. “A small cross-denominational sect, to be sure, but gaining some small degree of significance of late.” He gestured to take in the assembled multitude. “As it is, we are currently on our way to Utah, there to gain admittance to a certain seclusionary at the behest of our great leader. I have, myself, made a small hymnal to this most wondrous endeavour…”

  Eddie became aware that the gathered multitude—every single one of them—had begun to hum sonorously, as though in preparation for a rendition of an entirely different nature from an inept and sappy perpetration of “Kumbaya”. There was a low solemnity to the voices that spoke of absolute and fervent seriousness.

  And, now, they began to sing:

  ”Ohhh… we’re off to see the Elder,

  The glorious Elder Seth!

  We hear he’s built a whiizz of a place

  And called it Deseret…”

  Eddie felt it was time he made his excuses and left.

  “Hey, it’s been fun,” he began,”but I really must be…”

  “Oh but I insist that you join us,” said Father Barnabas, a new light of intensity igniting in his eyes, in the sockets of the smiling mask of his face. “For a while, at the very least. And, who knows, when you hear the Good News we have to offer, and hear it for long enough, perhaps you’ll be amenable to—“

  It was at that point that the Testostorossa powered itself up with a blaze of headlamps and a roar. It powered towards Eddie and Father Barnabas and spun to halt, racking open a door.

  “I’m up and running,” it growled. “Get your kicks sucking men in dresses off some other time, yeah?”

  “Fuck you, you prototypical piece of shit,” snapped Eddie. And it must be said that he said it with a small sense of relief.

  A second before he had been pinioned by the eyes of Father Barnabas; now it was as if some spell had been broken.

  “It’s been, uh, real, you know?” he said to the somewhat nonplussed Father Barnabas, hauling the door shut. “Catch you in the church newsletter funny pages.”

  “So who were those jerks, anyway?” the Testostorossa demanded as they swung back out onto the main highway. “There’s a bunch-of-jerks shaped hole in my database and I don’t like it.”

  “Just this bunch of religious whackos,” Eddie told it shortly. He really needed to get some sleep. “Josephites, they called themselves, heading on to some loon-factory called Deseret. It’s not important. No big deal.”

  It would only be later, and elsewhere, that he would learn the truth about how wrong he was—and how close his escape, here and now, had been.

  The next time Eddie woke, without remembered dreams of any kind, it was to find the Testostorossa sitting inside what appeared to be a military compound, with various US Cavalry troops surrounding him. They were on the point of lowering their guns, which had previously been aimed directly at him through the Testostorossa’s windshield.

  Behind him the Brain Train was rumbling through the perimeter gates, the Behemoths fanning out to take up parking-position on a parade ground which had probably been someone’s pride and joy of order before getting churned up by Behemoth wheels.

  A few minutes later, when she came over to deliver the latest shot of the Leash, Trix Desoto told him that the Testostorossa had come slewing in through the perimeter on pre-programmed autopilot out of the blue. And it had only been someone on the Brain Train remembering to break communications-silence, and inform Arbitrary Base of their arrival, that had prevented him from being summarily taken out as a potential terrorist suicide bomber.

  On the whole, Eddie was slightly more relieved than otherwise that he had been asleep for the whole thing.

  Final Quadrant: Arbitrary Base

  And then, from an open window beyond the bed, a roscoe coughed “Ka-chow!”… I said, “What the hell—!” and hit the floor with my smeller… A brunette jane was lying there, half out of the mussed covers… She was as dead as vaudeville.

  “Brunette Bump-off”

  Spicy Detective

  May 1938

  Supplementary Data: File Retrieval

  [The following excerpts are from a
pgp-secure email sent from one Dexter Corncrake, a so-called “Research Consultant”—read freelance cracker—for the New York Times, to Detective Inspector Ronald Craven of the NYPD Missing Persons Unit on 07/06/2005. See relevant NSA-intercept archives. These excerpts are provided FOR BACKGROUND-INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY, on the basis that subsequent dormanting of both Corncrake and Craven fall outside the remit of this agency. No further action required.]

  I’m gonna print this out and then I’m gonna zero the hard-drive and burn my notes and then just try to forget about this whole shitty mess. It probably won’t do any good; there’s probably a quiet little transponder bug, on the lowest level of the operating system, discreetly reporting every keystroke back to its masters even as I type. I’m telling you, I’ve never really thought of myself as a coward, but all this is just too—

  I’ve made up this guy in my head and called him Stanley—just like the psychotherapist from that godawful book about multiple personalities. (I mean, the bitch had supposedly sixty-four separate automemes operating, one of whom was apparently this, like, total literary genius on the level of Shakespeare or Joyce. So why didn’t he write it, instead of bringing in some schlock-hack crap who wouldn’t know connected prose if it crawled up his, her, its or their collective backside?)

  Anyhow. I’ve made up this guy in my head and called him Stanley, and I’m going to write this to him, in the hope that I don’t let anything slip about, well, you, even by implication. That all right there, Stanley? Are you sitting down comfortably? Then let us begin:

  Federal-based systems were like this total dead end. The clearance procedure overrides were built right into the hardware when the Central Registry was consolidated. Utterly integral to it. Any ID-check flagged as “Special Services Section Eight” comes up clean, no actual data-exchange involved save for some rather high-powered context checking to preclude the obvious confusion with servicemen being invalided from the armed services on the grounds of mental health.